Diagram: Air New Zealand Flight 901
Project for a contemporary art history class at The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), instructor Bryony Roberts, 2014
As a personal assignment within "Expand and Contract", an art history class covering the emergence, dissipation and subsequently variable cohesion of radical art from the 1960s until the present, each student was asked to compare an artist within the scope of the course, firmly tied to a specific timeline of artistic history, to a contemporary practitioner. A set of drawings was assigned to arbitrate the formal intentions of each so as to gather a more comprehensive survey of the condition of art since 1960. This brief text attempts this analysis by investigating the ideas of wrapping, offset and estrangement in the works of Christo and Jeanne-Cluade (specifically in “Wrapped Reichstag”) and Adam Ferris (in “Man with the Pith Helmet, respectively).
Complacencies and Estrangements in the Works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude and Adam Ferriss
Throughout everyday existence, we accumulate a significant number of complacencies about the surroundings we inhabit. Numbed to the finite complexities of contemporaneity, it is a natural response that humanity would begin to exhibit signs of necessitated ignorance in the perception of those environments constantly encasing life.
This lack of sensual engagement with one’s surroundings inhabits a crucial component of much artistic exploration. Literary theorist Viktor Shlovsky notes in “Art as Technique” that “habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war”, coming to a conclusion that art must function to remove the spectator from a typical frame of reference. Estranged from the quotidian perspective with which we gaze onto the events passing before us, we return to normality as altered beings, forever eschewed from pedestrian progressions and their consequent ennui towards the everyday.
Such is the encounter garnered by much of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work. In particular, the artists’ “Wrapped Reichstag”, when taken into proper historical context, effectively defamiliarizes the audience. Paramount to this effect is the addition of void space between the immediate object (in this case, the Reichstag itself) and its wrapping. While initial conclusions may be prone to devolve the relationship to something of a 1-to-1 affair, closer inspection reveals a significant ontological differentiation between each element in the whole. That is to note, as the metallic fabric swoops along the structure’s façade, deviations begin to establish functionally protective seals between the ornamental accentuations (statues, cornices et cetera) and the fabric itself. Of course, it is within reason that we might conclude these discrepancies to be ineffectual things of pragmatics and preservation, but a more nuanced reading acknowledges their substantial importance in regards to the overall experiential journey which one takes once faced with the abstracted landmark. Undoubtedly, our phenomenological perception of the Reichstag is unmistakably altered by this void space, and, as result, we come to question our prior relationship with the building as an object itself in a myriad of terms, both contextual to narrated history and individual to the audience in the same instance.
It thus cannot be taken lightly that to encapsulate the German parliament, nonetheless on the eve of her unification after an ordeal birthed from both the most heinous war and the grimmest genocide ever to face mankind, is to engage the active space that is the perceptual distance between the individual (or the mass) and corresponding surroundings. Inasmuch as Christo and Jeanne-Claude engaged this conceptual gap, intentionally or not, they took on as their confines the innate state of an object of great importance with a large quality of historical baggage. The work, subsequently, is directly referential to its precedent. Would it truly have been of the same affect, had the artists chosen instead to wrap an object of more mundane nature?
A more immediately contemporary oeuvre along similar lines can be found in the works of Adam Ferriss, and, as a side note, of the larger part of the Glitch Art explorations currently undertaken across the artistic community. Akin to the Wrappings of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, these works inherently confine themselves to the chosen precedent which, in turn, estranges itself before us, the Audience, through an abstraction. For example, Ferriss’ “Man with a Pith Helmet” addresses a presumed situation of complete nonimportance. We gaze onto an otherwise unremarkable beach scene throughout which families and other visitors frolic across wide dunes and shallow surfs. In the most subtle way, Ferriss’ scripted abstraction gradually skews both the colors and timings of the piece so that, by its termination, at least four distinct realities simultaneously exist. Whereas the metallic resurfacing of the Reichstag created two firmly extant masses (the original building and its cloaked skin), the video, warped by Ferriss, achieves similar affect in the divulgence between time and image. How can we objectively gauge our assumedly true perceptions of the world after having been presented such definite bifurcations in the relationships intrinsic to Objecthood and Experience?
In this “void”, each aforementioned example shears our direct assumptions, and, in return, we are to face ourselves. We find in the discrepancy before us a direct confrontation with our own complacencies. What we initially presume to be an everyday interaction between a father and his son through a Frisbee completely deconstructs itself and its surrounding beach panorama into a stream of various realities. Likewise, a “glitch” – albeit more materialized than Ferriss’ inherently digital medium – emerges between the figure of a building and its displaced skin, together trampling across a controversial history hosted in an object (the Reichstag) by a people divided and disparaged by an era-changing war (the Germans). These interventions are integral to the distancing of the perception from its very gaze, thus enabling a space within which the agency of the spectator might take up its own account for the reality which otherwise passes unbeknownst.
On Air New Zealand Flight 901
On 28 November 1979, Air New Zealand Flight 901, while on a 237-passenger-occupied sightseeing trip over Antarctica, slammed without initial explanation into the mountainside of Mount Erebus on Ross Island, just off the coast of the ice-cloaked continents’s mainland. The incident at once claimed 257 lives, nearly doomed the reputation of the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 aircraft and delivered great confusion onto subsequent investigators.
After a many-year process, the cause of the accident was uncovered to be a combination of navigational misfortunes, coincident and, most importantly, visual estrangement. As the pilots approached the bay before the mountain on their closing of the Antarctic coastline, they came to believe that they had as planned flown into a nearly identically shaped bay some twenty-one miles West of their actual location. Their true position placed them effectively within a scale model situation in which their perceptual cues trained during instruction of visual-reference flying over the barren continent convinced them against reality, placing them before a sheet of fog concealing the slopes of the mountain. This bay at the foot of the mountain contained cliffs nearly exactly one-third the size of those with which the pilots had expected to make visual contact, rendering the combined perception of the crew to be a completely complacent situation in which each member worked from and amplified the assumptions of the others. Thus, they emerged only six seconds before impact from a state of nearly utter estrangement, lost hopelessly within a complex set of deterministic presumptions.
This unfortunate tale seems ideal for a comparison to the artistic techniques of Estrangement, primarily because its involvement within the realms of defamiliarizing nearly all those involved from their typical frames of reference. In the wake of the disaster, the nearly surreal images of the strewn aircraft’s parts along the paper-white sheet of ice skinning the mountain would shock the public. In so doing, it could be argued that they had torn the Fourth Wall in the perceptions we hold about jetliners. Otherwise singular objects, to see the wreckage of the aircraft is to see the destruction of an ideology held complacent to reduce public fears of air travel and its modern machinery alike.
In the drawings, these techniques are amplified, using a methodology of wrapping contingent to that of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, so that a further estrangement might be taken upon. Like both this duo and artist Adam Ferriss, the role of precedent can be read as paramount to the understanding of the piece. Through a discrepancy in wrapping, a simultaneity of existences is proposed which, in turn, questions our presumptions. We are presented several views of the exactly same aircraft, and, through an intentional abstraction in the understanding of such drawings, it might be posited that, were these drawings to represent the actual object in question in one real instance of perception, we have approached a kind of multiverse. Below the aircraft, we see in both plan and section the ground line, imminent to colossal impact. Furthermore, a series of geometric transformations estrange parts from the aircraft, splitting its assemblage before us into the myriad of constituencies which together territorialize the jetliner itself in its perceived instantiation as a grand piece of machinery. In a way, this is to prick our predisposed assumption, as the Public, to simplify the complex systems which surround us. We view the aircraft as a singular being, when in reality is an infinitely complicated combination of discrete systems. Therefore, the idea of its disintegration upon impact is quite disturbing for us, as it represents yet another ruinous derailment of our assumptions occurring beyond our control yet before our captivated (and willing) agency as an audience.
In the terms of the two works chosen in the presentation, this arbitrates the estranged techniques of both artists into the two singular compositions, acknowledging their contingent goals as self-similar in consequence for our presumed and often complacent understandings about the world. Ferriss’ employment of simultaneous situations between both real and virtual possibilities of a Deleuzian logic fuses with Christo and Jean-Claude’s use of discrepancy in wrapping to produce a finally eschewed presentation in the form of a highly removed notion of reality. This, in relation to our approaches at coping with the presumptions rampant in our experiences with the world, touches upon the errors of our very perceptions. Inevitable to everyday life, these are unavoidable facets of existence which are thoroughly acknowledged by the works of art analyzed, provocations to comprehend in deepened significance the variables deterministically tied to the contemporary Human Condition.
